Some thoughts on Batman and popular culture.

Batman's half-life in syndication, at least in the television market where we lived, proved to be short. After we saw it for the first time, it disappeared from our view for many, many years. When, as a teenager, I stumbled upon the full length feature they made from the show, I was appalled at how ridiculous it was. Then I rediscovered the television show proper, now a mainstay of cable television. I had much the same reaction. By that time I had discovered the comics, and I had a very different idea of how Batman should be portrayed. He was no longer "The Caped Crusader." He had become "The Dark Knight." In 1986, the comics presented my generation's definitive portrayal of Batman in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Gone were the bright splashes of primary colors--they were replaced by a muted palette of colors that reflected the moral ambiguity built into Miller's interpretation. The Batman of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One was a man obsessed, a near-psychotic vigilante who didn't play by the rules of fair play that Superman played by. At the story's climax, the age old question of, "Who would win, Batman or Superman?" was answered pretty definitively. Miller's interpretation presented a horrific vision of Gotham City and its defender that was a funhouse mirror view of our own world. Batman became a foil for an absurdist portrayal of modern society, in which it isn't so strange for a man to dress up like a bat and take the law into his own hands. It should be noted that this interpretation didn't appear sui generis: it built on the work of Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and even Bob Kane himself (I remember being completely surprised at how brutal the first Batman comics were, particularly their portrayal of The Joker). The Dark Knight Returns was the living end of this evolution. It would make a terrific movie, I thought at the time. Three years later, the movie version of Batman appeared.

When I first heard that Batman was to be directed by Tim Burton, I was dubious to say the least. At the time, he had directed Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, so I naturally assumed that Warner Brothers had the television series in mind when they hired him. After all, Burton's first two movies have more in common with the Batman television series than they do with the Batman found in the comics. My apprehension grew into outright fear when Michael Keaton was cast as Batman. About four months before it was released, I saw the first trailer for the movie. Imagine my surprise. Instead of a high camp parody, Burton seemed to be providing a literal translation of the comics--or, at least, as much of one as the producers of the movie would allow. I am sure that all of the false notes that Batman strikes are the result of corporate noodling and there was a lot of corporate noodling. The first time I saw Batman, I was beside myself. "This is what it should look like!" I vowed. Those first glimpses of Batman, of the Batmobile, of The Batcave, of all of the wonderful elements from the comics--those glimpses were magical. It was a movie that stroked the adolsescent comic collector in me even as an adult. Of course, the flaws were all there to see, and even during that first viewing, I was disappointed by them. The Prince songs seemed wholly out of place, and the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Vicky Vale was just...wrong, somehow. Jack Nicholson, alone on the production, was convinced that he was in the old tv show and provided the dreaded high camp parody the rest of the movie avoided. Even so, Batman was DARK. Batman was WEIRD. And Batman was one of the biggest hits that anyone had ever seen. A sequel was inevitable.

When Batman Returns appeared three years later, a certain amount of backlash had developed. There was no way that the sequel would be as successful as the original product. Not that it didn't try. The primary difference between Batman Returns and its predecessor was the amount of control Tim Burton had gained over the production. The second movie was entirely his baby. It represented his vision alone. As a result, Batman Returns was even darker than the original, even weirder. And it had weird sexual undercurrents. Batman Returns depicted the Catwoman as a whip-weilding dominatrix and it explored the attraction between the black rubber-clad Batman and the black rubber-clad Catwoman. One wonders what the mothers of American teen-agers thought about this. I suspect that Warner Brothers was EXTREMELY uncomfortable with it. Certainly, there was a group of critics who felt that the movie was TOO dark and TOO weird. Well, they got their wish. Burton had directed his last Batman movie.

Tim Burton's replacement at the helm of the third Batman movie was Joel Schumacher. Schumacher has made a career of producing slick product that is able to drum up enough business during its opening weekend to cover its expenses before the mass audience discovers just how crappy it is. With Batman Forever, he had his first opportunity to do this on a grander scale. He assembled the elements of a big first weekend and slapped together the movie. Schumacher was unable to reconcile the weirdness of Burton's interpretation of the character with the television interpretation, but I suspect that he was more comfortable with the television version. Certainly, his version takes a right turn toward high-camp parody, embodied by Jim Carrey's performance as The Riddler. Burton's carefully wrought nightmare city, a gloomy, gothic re-interpretation of Lang's Metropolis, erupts in Schumacher's movie in a riot of garish colors. Batman Forever was a dreadful movie, and Schumacher's follow-up, Batman and Robin was even worse. It's too soon to tell if Schumacher has succeeded in killing off one of the most profitable franchises in movies, but he has crippled it at the very least.

Fortunately, Tim Burton wasn't quite done with Batman. Burton's vision of the character made it into the animated television series that appeared just after Batman Returns. As of this writing, the show has been running on and off for about eight years now. The guys who are principally responsible for the look and depiction of Batman: The Animated Series are Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. Under their guidance, the animated series has done complete justice to the comics, even adapting many of the best stories from the comics directly. Alone of the various mass media versions of Batman, the animated series aproached Batman on his own terms and in his own idiom. The results were and continue to be a delight. The animated version of Batman even made the jump to the big screen in Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm, in which all of the charm of the television series was translated intact.

So what, exactly, is the appeal of Batman? What is at the root of the cultural phenomenon.

There is a clue to this question towards the beginning of Burton's Batman Returns. The scene has Bruce Wayne seated in his mansion, in semi-darkness. The Bat Signal is lit and directed into his ante-chamber. He rises. An invitation has been given and he escapes into his fantasy life. Batman is the angry misfit in us all, a dark avenger taking out his rage on grotesque avatars of the unconscious mind: Two Face represents our own duality, Catwoman is our repressed sexuality, The Joker is our baser natures given full license, The Penguin is our own physical inadequacies. The Joker, in particular, is a particularly complex archetype: it was Lon Chaney who said that nothing is scarier than a Clown after midnight.and in Gotham, it always seems to be about 13 minutes past midnight. Perhaps most interesting: the best Batman stories hint that all of Batman's enemies are avatars of himself. Certainly, Superman was never this complex.

Speaking of Superman: For myself and many others, one of the reasons for Batman's popularity over The Man of Steel is that Batman is a human being. We can believe that a man can train and equip himself like Batman, if he is driven far enough. Superman is beyond the pale. No one can become Superman. You DON'T believe that a man can fly. There is a level of moral ambiguity in Batman, too, that is absent in Superman. Superman is the kind of guy who seems to be too good to be true. Batman is a right bastard some of the time. Again, he's human. That lends him a good part of his appeal.

Last, but not least: Batman is a perfect melding of image and archetype. He is a figure from the darkest European fairy tales, a gothic superhero for all generations.